CrewNerd is a smartphone application designed for use on the water by rowers and paddlers, providing athletes and coaches with real-time information about stroke rate, time, speed, distance, direction, heart rate, and more. CrewNerd runs on iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone.

Athletes can create custom workouts of various kinds and record workout data which can then be reviewed on the device or exported in a variety of popular formats for analysis and charting. Exported data can be sent via email or through USB to your computer.

Rowing shells of all sizes are supported as well as kayaks, canoes, and dragonboats. Buoyant, waterproof cases are available to protect your device.

CrewNerd provides a free trial application on all environments allowing you to check out the application before you buy. We pride ourselves on excellent customer support and continuous improvement of our application. Click on one of the app store badges to the right to try CrewNerd on your phone!

We’ve been recommending the waterproof cases from LifeProof for our CrewNerd customers for several years now, but finding good mounting solutions on the water has sometimes been challenging depending on the kind of boat and rigging you’re working with.

The folks at LifeProof have recently released a new set of mounting solutions that offer a wider set of options than ever before. We recently ordered an assortment of their LifeActiv accessories to experiment with and we’re happy to show you what we found. Continue reading →

Posted inNews|Comments Off on New phone mounting options from LifeProof

We recently added support for fast GPS (up to 10 readings per second) on the iPhone using the Dual Corporation XGPS150/160 external GPS receivers. The faster sample rate makes it possible to shrink your speed smoothing window down to the minimum distance while still getting very stable speed & pace readings. On the water, this means that CrewNerd can react much more quickly when you pick up the power, showing your increase in speed in just a stroke or two.

An enterprising CrewNerd customer, Michael McGuirk, has explored how this can be done on Android as well, with no changes to CrewNerd being necessary. The trick is an app called “Bluetooth GPS Provider” that reads from the GPS accessory and tricks Android into passing those location readings along to any application that tries to use the GPS receiver in the phone. He’s written up a very detailed set of instructions that you can find here. Michael’s instructions reference one particular GPS unit, but the same technique should work with any standard GPS accessory. Thanks, Michael!

We’re pleased to announce that CrewNerd now supports direct workout uploads to Sportlyzer.com from both our iOS and Android versions. With Sportlyzer, you can easily save and share all of your workout data. Track your workout load and heart rate zones over the season, or drill into individual workouts to map your course, or quickly chart your speed, stroke rate, and heart rate.

We’re excited to announce that CrewNerd now supports the premier web site for athletes and coaches – TrainingPeaks.com. One of the top requests we’ve received from customers is to be able to upload workout data directly to the web for logging, analysis, and sharing without having to go through the multiple steps involved in exporting and uploading TCX files or other formats. Now, you can do this quickly and easily to TrainingPeaks.com in both our iPhone and Android versions.

In both versions, start by entering your TrainingPeaks user name and password in the application settings page. Then, in the iOS version, select a practice in the history screen, scroll down to the export section, and press “Send to TrainingPeaks.com”. In the Android version, select a practice in the history screen, press the sharing button on the action bar, and select “TrainingPeaks”.

In a few seconds, your practice data (including location, speed, stroke rate, and heart rate) will be transferred to TrainingPeaks and available for charting and speed or heart rate zone analysis. Any notes you entered for the practice in CrewNerd are uploaded as well.

If you haven’t used TrainingPeaks.com before, we encourage you to give it a look and try uploading some of your data from CrewNerd to see what’s possible there. As always, we’re anxious to hear your thoughts and suggestions!

We’re excited to announce that CrewNerd is now available for Android devices. The Android version includes nearly all of the features that you’ve come to know and love on the iPhone. More on that in a minute… first, some details.

CrewNerd supports devices running Android version 4.1 (Jelly Bean) or newer. The application screens are optimized for phones but the app has been tested on 7″ and 10″ tablets as well.

CrewNerd is available as a free app and runs in “trial mode” at no charge, allowing users to try the application for 100 strokes or 5 minutes at a time. To remove the trial mode restrictions, an “unrestricted use” subscription can be purchased for $1.99 per month in the United States (price varies worldwide). The subscription includes a 7-day free trial period and can be cancelled at any time.

Like the iPhone and Windows Phone versions, live tracking is supported and tracking time can be purchased for the same low price as on the other phone platforms. The live tracking viewer at CrewNerd.com is free.

The row/paddle screen for Android

On Android, CrewNerd allows you to add or remove rows on the row/paddle screen and any row can be made “double-height” to highlight the data most important to you. Just tap and hold on any data row to change its configuration. Other key features available on Android include:

Check and bounce data

Heart rate monitoring (with the Zephyr HxM monitor)

Coach mode

Full support for exporting workout data by email or over USB. Export formats include: GPX, KML, TCX, and CSV.

We’ve made a couple of updates to the iOS version recently. Version 4.05 made it possible for all rowers & paddlers to get performance data from the iPhone by speech output. This was originally developed for vision-impaired athletes, but is now easily usable by anyone. The speech output can be tailored both in frequency and content so you can get the data that you want, when you want it.

In version 4.06, we’ve made a slight adjustment to the way that distance and speed is calculated by CrewNerd. In the earlier iPhone models (3G and 3GS) the GPS readings were less accurate and tended to overestimate the distance actually travelled. CrewNerd compensated for this error using an adjustment algorithm that worked very well at the time. Recent on-the-water tests with newer phones have shown that the GPS accuracy is much better now, rendering the old adjustment code obsolete.

With version 4.06, distances will now be reported as just slightly longer, and speeds will be slightly faster. Based on a series of on-the-water tests and validation using Google Earth, the new update appears to be more accurate than ever before.